This post was written by PolicyLink Senior Associate Sarah Treuhaft.
Childhood obesity is a key dilemma of our generation. Since the early 1970s, obesity rates have doubled for 2 to 5 year olds, tripled for adolescents ages 12 to 19, and quadrupled for 6 to 11 year olds. Not surprisingly, rates are highest for low-income and nonwhite kids who are more likely to live in neighborhoods that seem to conspire against healthy choices.
What can be done? A theme issue of the journal Health Affairs released this morning asks this question, exploring trends, presenting lessons learned from state and local actions, and addressing the roles of neighborhoods, food policy, and schools in reversing the epidemic.
The new journal includes an article we wrote with colleagues at The Food Trust that describes the nuts and bolts of how one policy win can lead to many. In Pennsylvania, advocates successfully established a fund in 2004 that has since helped 83 grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and neighborhood stores open in underserved neighborhoods or expand their existing stores (all while creating or saving 5,000 jobs!).
Over the past several years, Illinois and New York state, as well as the city of New Orleans, launched similar programs based on the Pennsylvania model. The Obama Administration has proposed a $400 million investment in a national Healthy Food Financing Initiative. (We are working to make this happen, click here to find out more and sign on to our letter of support).
The article discusses how advocates moved the campaigns forward at the state and national level, presenting it as a five-step framework from understanding the problem through data and mapping analysis to policy implementation and evaluation. Hopefully, it can help policymakers, child advocates, health coalitions, and others advance their own childhood obesity campaigns.
(Video courtesy of the very cool Market Makeovers program in LA. Check them out)
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s proposed $3.8 trillion budget ran into immediate trouble in Congress on Monday among lawmakers who said it tries to do too much while cutting the deficit too little.
The quick response came as Obama sought to juggle his twin goals of creating jobs, which entails tax cuts and new spending, and cutting the deficit, which involves the opposite.
“States Restart Health-Care Push,” - The Wall Street Journal Tight Budgets May Limit Legislative Efforts to Lift Coverage as National Plan Stumbles
With the fate of a national health care overhaul unclear, state legislators are pushing their own bills aimed at expanding coverage, though tight budgets are likely to hinder many of these efforts.
Lawmakers in at least two states, California and Missouri, have introduced legislation for the current session to create government-backed coverage for state residents. In others, including Virginia and New Jersey, legislators are hoping to tweak existing state programs to include more people.
The first lady takes childhood obesity as her cause.
The White House Kitchen Garden is frozen under, but, this Black History Month, first lady Michelle Obama is once more using food to address the epidemic of childhood obesity that has gripped the country and, she said in a recent speech to the United States’ Conference on Mayors, “never fails to take my breath away.”
A couple years ago, a celebrity chef out of London convinced the city’s school district to allow him to remake the lunch menu (and kitchens) of a group of city schools. He argued the change could make the kids both healthier and more successful at school.
The results so far are incredibly encouraging:
Their answer – a provisional one, since they are still refining the research – is that feeding primary school kids less fat, sugar and salt, and more fruit and vegetables, has a surprisingly large effect. Authorised absences, the best available proxy for illness, fell by 15 per cent in Greenwich, relative to schools in similar London boroughs. And relative to other boroughs, the proportion of children reaching Level Four in English rose by four and a half percentage points (more than six per cent), while the proportion of children achieving Level Five in Science rose by six points, or almost 20 per cent.
Cereal and Saturday morning cartoons go together like peanut butter and jelly. The downside is what else our children are seeing when they turn on the television.
The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University on Monday released Cereal F.A.C.T.S. (Food Advertising to Children and Teens Score) earlier this week which reported on, and rated, how cereals are marketed, and specifically targeted, towards children.
According to the report’s executive summary, “The least healthy cereals are the ones most marketed to children, and overall, children are exposed to a vast amount of marketing for highly-sugared cereals, more than for any other category of packaged food.”
Their results found that seven of the 10 cereals with the poorest nutritional content are the same products most heavily advertised on television and the internet. One of the study’s key findings is that cereals marketed to children have 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber, and 60 percent more sodium. And although none of these cereals qualifies to be included in the USDA Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, they all are designated as “smart choices” by the Council of Better Business Bureaus. These foods may proclaim to be “better-for-you,” but in actuality they are contributing to children’s poor health and the obesity epidemic.
With marketing targeting our young people, it creates a near toxic media environment that overwhelms kids with advertising on children’s networks and websites like Nickelodeon, Disney, and the Cartoon Network–networks that now bring the advertising into our homes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week..
However alarming the statistics in the study may be, they are also indications that environmental factors can be changed via policy change and governmental regulation.
In the long run, this kind of regulation is helpful for all of our children, especially those who are disproportionately impacted by overweight and obesity: children of color and children in low-income communities.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan came to town carrying a letter that could help thousands of area homeowners finally finish their renovations.
The letter, which Donovan gave on Thursday to Louisiana Recovery Authority head Paul Rainwater, approved a change to the Road Home program that could distribute $600 million in leftover program money, giving up to $34,000 in extra grant money to as many as 19,000 low- to moderate-income homeowners, Rainwater said.
DETROIT — The U.S. government has made it clear that developing a domestic auto-battery industry — for advanced batteries to power next-generation electric cars — is a priority. That has states scrambling to be sure they get a piece of the action.
This week, business leaders, politicians and entrepreneurs will gather in Detroit at a conference called “The Business of Plugging In” to discuss the future of plug-in electrics and plan how to attract and develop businesses involved in plug-in vehicle development.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from the public.
Americans remain sharply divided about the overall packages moving closer to votes in Congress and President Obama’s leadership on the issue, reflecting the partisan battle that has raged for months over the administration’s top legislative priority. But sizable majorities back two key and controversial provisions: both the so-called public option and a new mandate that would require all Americans to carry health insurance.
After months of lending its cautious, very qualified support to health-care reform, the health-insurance industry has lobbed its first bomb at the Democrats’ proposals. But many of the industry’s assertions appear to have missed their mark.
Just two days before Tuesday’s scheduled vote on the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill, a report warning that the bill would result in sizable hikes in insurance premiums was released, and then widely panned as a flawed analysis of cherry-picked information. A spokesman for the committee called the report a “hatchet job, plain and simple”; and some Democrats on Capitol Hill claimed that the insurers’ broadside would actually ease, rather than slow, passage of health reform by unifying the various factions of the party against an industry with precious little credibility among the public. (See 10 players in health-care reform.)
WASHINGTON — As the White House and Congressional leaders turned in earnest on Wednesday to working out big differences in the five health care bills, perhaps no issue loomed as a greater obstacle than whether to establish a government-run competitor to the insurance industry.
One day after the Senate Finance Committee approved a measure without a “public option,” the question on Capitol Hill was how President Obama could reconcile the deep divisions within his party on the issue. All eyes were on Senator Olympia J. Snowe, the Maine Republican whose call for a “trigger” that would establish a government plan as a fallback is one of the leading compromise ideas.
NEW ORLEANS — In his first presidential visit to this city, Barack Obama praised the resiliency of residents in rebuilding their flood-wrecked homes and promised to continue flowing federal dollars to the effort.
“It is always an inspiration to spend time with the men and women who have reminded the rest of us what it means to persevere in the face of tragedy and rebuild in the face of ruin,” Obama said during a town-hall-style meeting at the University of New Orleans.
WASHINGTON — Democratic leaders pressed President Barack Obama on Wednesday to extend more elements of the existing economic-stimulus package, and to possibly add tax cuts that were rejected the first time around, despite a record budget deficit that is giving some lawmakers pause.
On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the federal deficit for fiscal 2009 will be $1.4 trillion. That is somewhat better than the nearly $1.6 trillion the CBO projected in August, but much of the change stems from different accounting treatments for losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage companies the government took over last year.
On his first day in Huntington, W. Va., Jamie Oliver spent the afternoon at Hillbilly Hot Dogs, pitching in to cook its signature 15-pound burger. That’s 10 pounds of meat, 5 pounds of custom-made bun, American cheese, tomatoes, onions, pickles, ketchup, mustard and mayo. Then he learned how to perfect the Home Wrecker, the eatery’s famous 15-inch, one-pound hot dog (boil first, then grill in butter). For the Home Wrecker Challenge, the dog gets 11 toppings, including chili sauce, jalapeños, liquid nacho cheese and coleslaw. Finish it in 12 minutes or less and you get a T-shirt.
So much for local color. Earlier that day, Oliver met with a pediatrician, James Bailes, and a pastor, Steve Willis. Bailes told him about an 8-year-old patient who was 80 pounds overweight and had developed Type 2 diabetes. If the child’s diet didn’t change, the doctor said, he wouldn’t live to see 30. Willis told Oliver that he visits patients in local hospitals several days a week and sees the effects of long-term obesity firsthand. Since he can’t write a prescription for their resulting illnesses, he said, all he can do is pray with them.
As a key Senate committee prepares today to pass its plan to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system, senior Democrats are acknowledging that it may be impossible to provide coverage to all Americans — a central goal of President Obama and his congressional allies.
That is fueling growing alarm among hospitals and insurance companies, which have made universal coverage a condition of their support.
Never underestimate the power of an old blue sweater - even one with a cheesy design of two zebras in front of Mount Kilimanjaro. Maybe especially one with zebras and a mountain.
That very sweater launched Jacqueline Novogratz’s career as an international social investor, and it is the inspiration of her recently published book, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (Rodale, $24.95).
Across the USA, states are falling short of their goals to increase the use of renewable energy as Congress weighs a national renewable-energy standard.
Thirty-five states have set goals to use more electricity from solar panels, windmills and other renewable forms of energy, according to a database funded by the Energy Department. There is no central clearinghouse of states’ compliance records, but USA TODAY research and interviews with state and power company officials found nine states that have failed or expect to fail to meet their energy goals.
The American health-care system suffers from three serious problems: Health-care costs are rising much faster than our incomes. More than 15 percent of the population has neither private nor public insurance. And the high cost of health care can lead to personal bankruptcy, even for families that do have health insurance.
These faults persist despite annual federal government spending of more than $700 billion for Medicare and Medicaid as well as a federal tax subsidy of more than $220 billion for the purchase of employer-provided private health insurance.
Beginning today, women and children who receive food vouchers through the federal government’s WIC program will be able to use them to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.
“It’s a really welcome change,” said Gail Harrison, a public health professor at UCLA who was on the national Institute of Medicine panel that recommended the revisions to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children — the first major change in the program since it began in the 1970s. “The supplemental food package contributes a very substantial share of dietary intake, and so making it healthier is all to the good.”
ZURICH — Like every other country in Europe, Switzerland guarantees health care for all its citizens. But the system here does not remotely resemble the model of bureaucratic, socialized medicine often cited by opponents of universal coverage in the United States.
Swiss private insurers are required to offer coverage to all citizens, regardless of age or medical history. And those people, in turn, are obligated to buy health insurance.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is close to committing as much as $35 billion to help beleaguered state and local housing agencies continue to provide mortgages to low- and moderate-income families, according to administration officials.
The move would further cement the government’s role in propping up the housing market even as some lawmakers push to curb spending at a time of rising debt.
WASHINGTON — Government efforts to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into the U.S. economy appear to be helping the U.S. climb out of the worst recession in decades.
But there’s little agreement about which programs are having the biggest impact. Some economists argue that efforts such as the Federal Reserve’s aggressive buying of Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities, as well as government efforts to shore up banks, are providing a bigger boost than the administration’s $787 billion stimulus package.
To the credit of opponents of health-care reform, the lies and exaggerations they’re spreading are not made up out of whole cloth—which makes the misinformation that much more credible. Instead, because opponents demand that everyone within earshot (or e-mail range) look, say, “at page 425 of the House bill!,” the lies take on a patina of credibility. Take the claim in one chain e-mail that the government will have electronic access to everyone’s bank account, implying that the Feds will rob you blind. The 1,017-page bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee does call for electronic fund transfers—but from insurers to doctors and other providers. There is zero provision to include patients in any such system.
WEDNESDAY, Sept. 2 (HealthDay News) — Obese mothers have children who are likely to be obese, but a new study concludes that weight-loss surgery can break the cycle.
Researchers found that women who had weight-loss surgery before becoming pregnant had children who were less likely to be heavy when compared with siblings who were born before the weight-loss surgery.
